Subathra Subramaniam is an English choreographer, dancer, educator and artistic director of Sadhana Dance. Navigating the confluence of arts and science drawing from her belief that dance, her choreography can play a part in the public understanding and engagement with scientific concepts.
Sabda saha Pintura
We’re delighted to be able to share with you Sabda saha Pintura. Meaning ‘sound and picture’, this piece was created by artist Nichola Scrutton during her time in residency at Sura Medura.
To read more about Nichola’s experiences on residency, you can head here to read her blog.
You can also read more about Nichola Scrutton’s work on her website: www.nicholascrutton.co.uk
Nichola Scrutton – Blog Post 2
Developing – 23rd November 2016
Sunbeach, where we are staying for the residency, is a great place and everyone is really helpful so eventually, after the first week, things settled down a bit.
In week 2 Sumit arrived so there was a bit of getting-to-know-you time, and the three of us chatted regularly. We discovered common and differing ways in our processes and practices, and endeavoured to understand how each wanted to work. Because we all had phases where we needed to work alone, the gatherings were particularly valuable and supportive.
In week 3 we travelled to the University Faculty of Visual and Performing Arts in Colombo and shared our work in presentations with students and staff. That was a really good day – as well as meeting people, we were fortunate to be shown round all the art departments then had lunch before travelling back.
With presentations done it was now time to develop a work. I decided early on that my main tools for gathering actual sound material would be binaural microphones and a portable recorder. Part of my plan was to respond in different ways to the environment for future reinterpretation in sound, for example through spontaneous mark making, but I knew I definitely wanted to make a sound work for our forthcoming residency event later in November.
I realised quite quickly that that idea was a bit challenging – for one thing, I was conflicted about spending too much time composing at the computer when there was so much to explore and experience. The heat, humidity, mozzie bites and limited equipment threw in additional curves to negotiate. I also knew I wanted to do some kind of performance. I decided just to keep gathering and see what happened.
The sound environment is generally very dense and I spent quite a bit of time actively listening and drawing. The area is divided – beach side and jungle side – and each has its own distinct soundscape. On the beach side the sea roars continuously as the surf thunders in and on the jungle side the air is thick with heat, bird song, massive trees rustling and people going about their daily lives. A railway line runs between the two through much of the area and regular trains, horns and bells punctuate the air. In the mix are a whole rich array of sounds – the hollering voices of people selling at markets and on the street, the honking and revving of huge buses overtaking other vehicles at breakneck speed (treacherous), thunderstorms and torrential rain, intermittent firework eruptions, the bread, fish and other vans making melodic announcements and so on.
At some point, I started to sense rhythms and cycles, and this was to become a guiding feature of the sound/music. In the end, a piece emerged in a collage form, through which I tried to evoke an essence of this wonderful place. I was initially concerned that the binaural recordings might be difficult to work with in this way because they were so dense but in actual fact they worked really well because the place and spatial content was so rich and varied. I could both cut between different sounds abruptly and find similarities that allowed me to morph from one sound to another. While doing this work I saw there was another strand I wanted to develop, working with voices, as well as continue with drawing/mark making – but that will come later. Ultimately there were many ideas…
Now it’s also time to start preparing for Moving Out and the Colombo Art Biennale…more on that in part 3.
Moving Through
presents
Moving Through
Noon – Midnight
Saturday 12th December
Sunbeach Hotel Hikkaduwa and Dodanduwa
On December 12th, Hikkaduwa and Dodanduwa will host an extraordinary international programme of performances, music and installations featuring performers and artists from 7 countries and Sri Lanka.
The programme is organised by Scottish based artist and producer Neil Butler of international arts organisation UZ Arts. Neil has been bringing international artists and performers to Sri Lanka since 200, organising the first Hikkaduwa Beach Carnival in 2005 and establishing the Sura Medura Residency for international artists the following year.
In 2007, Neil organised a Peace Concert with the Maharaja Organisation. Since its inception he has supported the Colombo Arts Biennale as International Curator and for the second edition as co-director. In February 2015 he brough an extraordinary range of artists to audiences in Hikkaduwa and Colombo, with the finale being the building of a life size paper boat by the artist Frank Bölter, which delighted and bemused audiences as Frank attempted to sail back to Germany.
For the December 12th event, he has brought together artists from Scotland, Austria, Nigeria, Switzerland, Italy, the Czech Republic and Ireland.
Over a 6-week residency the artists have created their own installations and performances as they response to the country and culture surrounding them. Over the last two weeks they have worked together to create a collective performance where they will be joined on the 12th of Decemeber for the finale by Sri Lankan artists and performers, and performers from the Afro Sri Lankan community of Puttalam and Sirambiadiya.
Said Neil Butler; “We invite the public to meet the artists, enjoy their installations and performances and then join in the party at the end of the day for a rice and curry banquet, singing, dancing and fireworks”.
The day starts at noon at Sunbeach Hotel in Hikkaduwa and continues with a journey to nearby fishing village of Dodanduwa, where there will be remarkable installations and performances centred around a wrecked trawler that has been turned into a musical instrument. There will be performances in and around the sea and then a party in the evening back at Sunbeach Hotel.
All the events are free but if you wish to join the artists for lunch or dinner, you should reserve a place by emailing – movingthrough@uzarts.com
Matteo Lanfranchi Blog Post 2
Follow the link below to read Matteo’s second blog post on his experiences in Sri Lanka.
Matteo Lanfranchi Sura Medura blog post 2
John Rogers Blog Post 3
“Just me and the tea”
Click here to read John’s third blog post, delving in to his experiences in week three of his residency at Sura Medura.
John Rogers Blog Post 2
“A long, hard look”
Click here for John’s second blog post, detailing his experiences in week 2 of his residency at Sura Medura.
New Residency in 2015
One week into the Sura Medura International Residency and 7 artists from 6 Countries are preparing for a series of presentations to students and artists in Colombo on the 17th November.
These presentations, which are organised with our partner Thenuwara Chandraguptha of the University of Visual and Performing Arts in Colombo, are a critical part of the residency, where Sura Medura artists share their artistic practise with their peers in Sri Lanka.
After the presentations, Matteo will lead workshops for students who will be invited to then join the residency and take part in a series of performances and exhibitions that will mark the end of the residency on the 11th and 12th December.
In the meantime, Juri is planning on building an orchestra of bamboo friction drums to emerge from the sea and Martin intends to turn a shipwrecked trawler into a musical instrument.
The tail end of the monsoon is creating waterfalls around our dinner, but the days remain dry-ish!
– Neil Butler (UZ Arts)
Alex Rigg Residency Blog 2014/15
Colombo immigration office – Monday 26th January 2015
Sitting in the visa office waiting for a renewal so that we can stay to finish the residency.
What a lovely place, fresh flowers on the coffee tables and a clear, helpful staff who entertain us with stories from their childhood…
This is my fourth week here and Sri Lanka continues to surprise. I have made one performance in the local market, a collaboration with Adrian. Pretty wild there and very varied reactions…Mostly good. This follows a period of accumulating objects and costume ideas; spending time further up the road from Sura Medura at the workshop of Mangelika. I am hiring one of her treadle-powered sewing machines to work on: she bought it within the last couple of years as new for £150 but it is actually a reconditioned and vintage Singer that is on it’s last legs.
The Mirage Hotel. Colombo – Tuesday 10th February
So…Sitting in a room here on the Marine Drive, Colombo with a lot of very vivid memories and several exciting performance events later. In response to the potential questions ‘what have I learned here?’ I would answer that I’m not sure yet…I am certainly not the person I was before I arrived. I have undergone some kind of change here.
In response to the question ‘what is the value of this residency to me?’ I would say that it has provided an intense, uneasy, alarming, charming, edgy, humbling, annoying, astonishing, provoking, friendly, dangerous, challenging, contrasting, confusing and edifying experience in both artistic and personal terms.
I made six interventions:
Hikkaduwa Sunday market
Sunbeach Hotel into Vibration nightclub
Mangelika’s house in the jungle down into the sea
The Goethe Institut, Colombo
La Voile Blanche beach club, Colombo
The University of Visual and Performing Arts, Colombo
Each was a collaboration with one or more other artists and musicians, some of whom were part of the same residency programme and some of whom live in Sri Lanka. Each event was free and was accessible to both Europeans and Sri Lankans alike. I made a specific policy to create an atmosphere during the performances that temporarily removed the divide between White and Black that exists here as an ex-colonial island that suffered many generations of inequality. That sentiment also extends to the inequalities between sexes that is a very current issue here.
Speaking briefly as part of the seminar at the Goethe Institute I touched on the idea of artists as child and the audience as tolerant parent. The child makes something and asks the parents to look at it and praise it. The parents want to encourage the creative endeavours of their child and give it praise and the opportunity to make more things. This is a fundamental approach that would I would like to see adopted by all countries. I also discussed the notion that I use costume as a disguise for performance work that is more complex and demanding of the audience than they first perceive. Odd costume is used in my work to draw an audience close in to the performers, close enough so that they become aware of this duality and begin to question the nature of the work itself, promoting a debate about the work rather than presenting a set of solutions.
I am very interested in plants and animals and Sri Lanka has a phenomenal variety of both…Wish I had brought my binoculars.
Wish also I had brought tools and equipment as my concept of a clear slate at the start meant time was wasted trying to locate the right kind of shop that might supply both. In actual fact no single shop supplies everything and the journey of discovery can be more interesting than the success of finding…or some such mantra.
Colombo International Airport – Wednesday 11th February
At the airport there is a square of white cord surrounding a seating area that is reserved for clergy from the Buddhist community here. The priests were sat eating rice and curry from newspaper wrappers. Along the hall a little way were both Muslim and Christian prayer rooms. The chaos of life sits close to the surface, the speed of growth and decay so much faster than at home in Scotland. An acceptance of this rapid change sits alongside ancient traditions and practises that have not changed for hundreds of years. In rural districts more than half of the population are involved in manual manufacturing processes. Less than half of the population are ever likely to send an email.
It is almost impossible to avoid being labelled as a tourist and therefore as wealthy. Despite many conversations with people from here about my work as an artist and consistently failing to fit the mould of self-indulgent surf and sun worshipper, the local audience in advance of one event said that they were looking forward to seeing a tourist dancing. The word tourist simply means everyone not from Sri Lanka. No point in fighting that I think.
I had several days teaching fourth year textile students at the university in Colombo. Lovely people and very helpful staff. Unfortunately none of the sewing machines were working, the students didn’t know how to use them in any case, there was a national election and no one had told me that the students were going home for several days, the Pope visited the following week and the school was closed. None of the students that I had requested over several months of meetings and correspondence were available to make and perform a project with me. I must say that conversations with artist friends who had worked here last year helped to formulate a stoic attitude towards such conclusive shifts in available resources. I had a plan A, B and C.
That would be my main piece of advice to an artist trying to work here…Either that or be here more than two months in order to develop a clearer relationship with the people you need to work with.
I think that bringing a piece of work with me to show at the start of my residency would have helped local people to better understand what I was asking from them in terms of making a collaboration.
Maybe.
There exists in my mind now an idea that I might want to return here and resume the work that I have begun. That is the best indicator that I have to show me how I feel about the project, apart, that is, from feeling totally overwhelmed.
Jo Hodges & Robbie Coleman Blog 3
Nothing Like Anything
During the final phase of the residency, after completing our work for the Biennale, we based ourselves in the village where our house was located.
The strange ebb and flow of energy, the heat and resultant addled thinking meant that sometimes we struggled to engage with the development of ideas and at other times we had too many things to be working on.
There were two ideas that we began, but didn’t manage to complete during our stay:
Tsunami Museum
We had wanted to explore ideas of home through the life of the woman running the Tsunami museum in the ruins of her house that was destroyed by the Tsunami (see blog 1) and we had visited her to audio record her talking about her life. However the museum is right on a main road and it was impossible to get a good voice recording due to the traffic noise, hooting tuk tuks and buses etc. Perhaps we will be able to transcribe the audio and combine the text with still images, however we decided to put the idea on the back burner and focus on other areas.
Photo Manipulation
Photographs feature prominently in most peoples homes, with framed prints (mainly of weddings) standing in groups on the floor. People we visited always showed us their photo albums, often the laminated images having become damp and degraded into fractured versions. Albums of funeral images were also produced.
During the time that we spent finding print shops, we had noticed that the busy photo printers all had computers (very few people have them at home) in the public areas with photos being manipulated, viewable by all. Bride and Groom would be being extracted in Photoshop and pasted onto a more suitable backdrop, shoes were being touched up, tatoo’s being removed and rings being erased from fingers. This manipulation process fascinated us and we began experimenting with photo’s of people we met on the Wewelgoda road. People love having their photo taken and enjoy seeing the image. The idea was to take a photograph and then give back the photo to the subject, but with the photo manipulated in some way to represent the context. We started the project by taking an image of the man who operated the railway crossing. We took a photo of him and then gave him back the photo of himself photoshopped onto the platform of an old photo of the Flying Scotsman. He was enjoyably flabbergasted as he remembered when there were steam trains on his part of the line.
We also took a photos of one of our tuk tuk driver friends and sent him and his tuk tuk into a taxi rank in London in the 1950’s (his reaction when we gave it to him was brilliant) Unfortunately our time in Sri Lanka ran out and we had to leave that project for another time.
The rest of the work took the form of small-scale experimental works, and we worked on completing the remainder of the strands that we had been developing.
Street Bags
We concluded the street bag project. We developed a series of designs that included images and writing reflecting our time in Sri Lanka. The text pieces explored our response to the surroundings and the climate and were designed to be small provocations dropped into the street life in the towns and cities. Ideas ranged from the dreams of lost cosmonauts to swimmers in underground oceans, All explored the feeling we had that there was more than one way that we were ‘present’ in this place. We made multiple copies of each design and made them into bags.
We gave bundles of the bags to street sellers who were delighted to use them as they normally have to buy them from the home recyclers. It was great to hand them out and then walk back down the street and see them being used.
Within this project we also developed a small-scale collaboration with Garry Duthie, Prof. of Nutritional Science at the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health, Aberdeen. He had been involved in developing a recipe book called
‘Stovies Reloaded’, reworking traditional Scottish recipes to make them healthier. We had been surprised to see so many vegetables commonly grown in Scotland, on sale in the markets; leeks, potatoes, cabbage , beetroot etc
We used recipes from Stovies Reloaded, had them printed and made them into bags for street sellers. Perhaps some Sri Lankan homes will be experimenting with Scotch Broth and leek and potato soup! We are also hoping that the images will make for interesting discussion points about recycling and healthy snacks back in Scotland.
Dogs of the Wewelgoda Road
We completed the printing of our educational posters of the local dogs (see blog 2) and gave them out to children along the road. They had fun pointing out all the dogs that they knew. The poster was on display at the community event that we held (see below). The poster has been laminated and hung at the gates of the local community project for passers by to see. A second poster featuring additional dogs has been given to Eddi who runs the community project with blank spaces for children to draw any dogs missing.
Paper Slippers
We continued to experiment with our paper flip flops, the process of which helped us to explore the public space in the village which seemed to be mainly temples and space outside the small shops. There are places along the road (which is really a dirt track) where people stop and chat , and outside our house was a small area where boys came and played cricket after school. Our garden was in reality part of the pitch and the ball would often land on our roof and in the garden. We placed the flip-flops in public spaces as well as outside houses and in gardens, experimenting with different configurations. This caused much interest as well as discussion and identification of the plants that the flip-flops were made out of.
Community Showing
Our house was at a crossroads in the village and many people passed us everyday as we worked in the garden. Much of our time there had been spent smiling, waving and saying hello to passers by. We had made friends and people came to visit and chat to us. Everyone seemed intrigued by what we were doing so we decided to have a community ‘showing’ of some of the work that we and fellow artist Hannah Braxton had been making. We put up a screen between the pillars of out house, which was viewable from the road and borrowed a projector from Eddi at the community project.
We made ‘Busby Berkley ‘style stop frame animation with the paper flip flops using photos of the flower that grow in the village as the backdrop. Life in Sri Lanka felt surreal much of the time, and we created the animation to reflect that. We projected this at dusk together with an animation that Hannah had made of local house brooms. We also made an installation with the flip flops inside the house for people to peer in the window at and the dog poster was on display.
We told a few people about the event on the day of the showing and hoped that word would spread – it did! Children came and helped with the preparations and at dusk people started arriving. We were also graced by the presence of one of the dog ‘stars’ of the poster. Together with Hannahs fabulous work, there was a lot to see, and the garden was full of children and adults having a good time – it was a great night and lots of fun.
Tuk Tuk
We met up with Duminda to film him driving around the jungle roads. Glasgow based musician, Anders Rigg (Samson Sounds) had written a great reggae track for his tuk tuk incorporating sounds of the jungle, the daily sweeping and the tuk tuk that we had recorded and sent to him. Duminda has a big sound system in his tuk tuk and you can hear him coming from a long way off.
We hopped in the tuk tuk with Duminda , and with Anders track blaring, he took us on an exhilarating trip round the area including a short cut up a footpath next to the railway to avoid the army checkpoint, while we filmed. The footage gives a fascinating insight into the local area and will be made into a music video and uploaded to YouTube.
Reflections
Beyond the physical outputs of our work, the residency has had a far deeper resonance for our ongoing practice. We are interested in relationships between people, environment and place, so being immersed in the village gave us not only the opportunity to explore and respond to these relationships, but also a chance to relook at the everyday life in Scotland that we take for granted, and to consider issues of sustainability and social justice.
Sri Lanka is classed as a developing country and most people have limited access to mass-produced goods. This has resulted in the prominence of craft, the handmade and the use of hand tools, and as a result skills were highly developed in areas that we in the ‘West’ no longer inhabit. The localness of production and the recycling and reusing of everything was apparent in every aspect of daily life and we constantly marveled at the ingenuity of people in solving everyday problems with limited resources.
Our current practice concerns issues of sustainability and in Sri Lanka most people we met led simpler lives in terms of material wealth due to limited disposable income. Consumerism and corporateness were far less apparent with shorter supply chains – markets, local produce and small shops – and plastic packaging was minimal (see our bag project above) Some of what we saw was inspiring in terms of sustainability, although as a counterpoint there was the sobering fact of local corruption, people working 12 hour days for a pittance while the monks were reputed to be rich on the back of the donations of local people to the temples.
We became aware of the lack of screen culture, which we now take for granted here. It was interesting to be in the company of people without the constant checking of texts and emails, to look out of bus windows rather than down at screens and notice that chatting and smiling were the main way of passing the time when travelling. People did have mobile phones, but generally not smart phones, and it was rare to see a computer anywhere apart from print shops. (Most houses had old style TV’s with snowy reception mostly showing soaps and cricket)
In offices, records were generally still kept by hand (piles of files everywhere) and the clatter of old typewriters could be heard in solicitor’s offices. We loved being reminded of the hand made, the hand annotated, the handwritten; the individual ways of doing things before the sanitization of computers.
We also realized that a lot of the details that we loved, were noticed but not fully understood, the density of the culture differences and language barrier often being impenetrable.
In some ways there was a sense of liberation as we were released from the usual health and safety constraints in our culture. We hopped on and off moving buses and were crushed into trains. We marveled at the bare wires sticking out of the light over the bathroom sink and the way people balanced on top of walls and fences (and even a 4th floor window ledge) to carry out repairs. Being out of the usual cushion of rules and safety regulations and taking risks was challenging but exhilarating – a really useful component in exploring our own response to a different culture and place.
The residency was a fantastic opportunity for professional development and allowed us time to make new work, but we also wanted to look at our practice in a different context and this meant questioning our presence there. We tried to look critically at what we were doing; was our work relevant? How could / should our work engage with the local community? Would anyone be interested? Would our time there been better spent working more with local community projects? Our discussions were useful and contributed to the work that we made. We were heartened by the response to the community showing event that we held in our garden, and by the fact that so many people made a point of coming to wish us goodbye and asked us to come back.
Being in Sri Lanka was such an intense experience that we are still dreaming about it. We are left with images of the friendliness, gentle politeness and kindness of the people we met, the extreme heat, humidity and feeling of being submerged, the vibrant colours, the constant abundance of fruit and flowers, the intensity and immediacy of life, and the crazy, surreal encounters and absurd happenings which made us constantly laugh and which have permanently penetrated our everyday reality now we are back in Scotland.
We feel energized by our time in Sri Lanka and have been excited to get back to our ongoing projects with new outlooks and (perhaps) new understandings.
Our confidence in our areas of work and interest (socially engaged practice) has been reaffirmed and challenged in equal measure by the residency. It’s difficult to sum up the experience; perhaps the words of the oddly worded advertising for an electronics shop in Colombo do the job – “ Nothing Like Anything”